Linux Unix BSD

Linux Unix BSD

All of the distributions that follow are installable to a computer hard drive and most can be run live.

• gNewSense, a GNU/Linux distribution based on Debian and Ubuntu.
• BLAG, BLAG Linux and GNU, a free GNU/Linux distribution based on Fedora.
• Dragora, an independent GNU/Linux distribution based on concepts of simplicity.
• Dynebolic, a GNU/Linux distribution, with special emphasis on audio and video editing.
• Kongoni is a free GNU/Linux operating system of African origin. The name comes from the Shona word for a gnu (also known as a wildebeest).
• Musix GNU+Linux, a GNU+Linux distribution based on Knoppix, with special emphasis on audio production.
• Trisquel, a GNU/Linux distribution oriented to small enterprises, domestic users and educational centers.
• Ututo, a GNU/Linux distribution based on Gentoo. It was the first fully free GNU/Linux system recognized by the GNU Project.
• Venenux, a free distro built around the KDE desktop.

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PHP Session File Hacks

What they say about kung-fu is true..

It can be attained by anyone through hard work over time. You can become as good as the amount of work you put in. Here’s a short look at a basic technique that I use. Simply reverse engineering the source code and taking notes along the way…

static void php_session_send_cookie(TSRMLS_D)
  if (SG(headers_sent)) {
          if (output_start_filename) {
                  php_error_docref(NULL TSRMLS_CC, E_WARNING, "Cannot send session cookie - headers already sent by (output started at %s:%d)",
                          output_start_filename, output_start_lineno);
          } else {
                  php_error_docref(NULL TSRMLS_CC, E_WARNING, "Cannot send session cookie - headers already sent");
          }
          return;
  }
 
  /* URL encode session_name and id because they might be user supplied */
  e_session_name = php_url_encode(PS(session_name), strlen(PS(session_name)), NULL);

· File  ·  RSS | 8:00 PM

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Crazy POWERFUL Bash Prompt

This amazing bash linux prompt does more than meets the eye. If you want to know how to become really good with technology, linux is the secret sauce behind the AskApache articles. Open Source is elixir of the web. Thanks to everyone who helped me for the past 20 years. I use linux/bsd because homey don’t play, so this is geared to be as productive a prompt as I can make it.

Don’t have much time.. or just don’t care? Not a problem, here are the 3 lines to copy and paste – you can just paste them right in your shell to test it, or add to a startup script.

export AA_P="export PVE=\"\\033[m\\033[38;5;2m\"\$(( \`sed -n \"s/MemFree:[\\t ]\\+\\([0-9]\\+\\) kB/\\1/p\" /proc/meminfo\` / 1024 ))\"\\033[38;5;22m/\"\$((\`sed -n \"s/MemTotal:[\\t ]\\+\\([0-9]\\+\\) kB/\\1/p\" /proc/meminfo\`/ 1024 ))MB\"\\t\\033[m\\033[38;5;55m\$(< /proc/loadavg)\\033[m\";echo -en \"\""
export PROMPT_COMMAND="history -a;((\$SECONDS % 10==0 ))&&eval \"\$AA_P\";echo -en \"\$PVE\";"
export PS1="\\[\\e[m\\n\\e[1;30m\\][\$\$:\$PPID \\j:\\!\\[\\e[1;30m\\]]\\[\\e[0;36m\\] \\T \\d \\[\\e[1;30m\\][\\[\\e[1;34m\\]\\u@\\H\\[\\e[1;30m\\]:\\[\\e[0;37m\\]\${SSH_TTY} \\[\\e[0;32m\\]+\${SHLVL}\\[\\e[1;30m\\]] \\[\\e[1;37m\\]\\w\\[\\e[0;37m\\] \\n(\$SHLVL:\\!)\\\$ " && eval $AA_P

· Power  ·  RSS | 3:02 PM

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Questions I Ask Web Hosting Companies, Before Buying

The following is a transcript of a chat I had with a company called tektonic, and at that time I was looking for a cheap linux host to use for some redundancy/failover operations. I generally contact a new hosting company like this every few months.. I like to have options available in case of some kind of failure or network attack, so it’s always a good idea to have a few ace linux servers in your back pocket.

If you’ve read any other articles on AskApache, you can see a certain obsession towards optimization, speed, and security — so that is the purpose of the following questions.

· Hosting  ·  RSS | 6:15 AM

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HOWTO: Uninstall CPANEL over SSH

The following is just a quick reference of some of the commands I used to uninstall cpanel. This is for advanced users of the shell. If you aren’t that advanced and you run a single one of these commands without fully understanding it, you will probably kill your server, probably lose everything on it permanently, probably not have a website or email for weeks.. So backup all your data FIRST. Also, if you aren’t 100% sure you won’t run into problems, you should contact your hosts technical support – but be prepared for some MAJOR negativity.. cpanel makes things very easy for hosts, and the last thing tech support wants is to fix a server broken by someone who doesn’t know what they are doing.

· administration  ·  RSS | 2:55 PM

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Real-Life Htaccess Files from My Server

#### No https except to wp-admin -
# If the request is empty ( implies fopen or normal file access by a php script )
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^$ [OR]
 
# OR if the request if for wp-admin or wp-login.php
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/(wp-admin|wp-login\.php).*$ [NC,OR]
 
# OR if the Referer is https
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^https://www.askapache.com/.*$ [NC]
 
# THEN skip the following rule, basically all this does is force https or badhost to be redirected
# BUT because of the above 3 rewritecond's, this won't break poorly written admin scripts
RewriteRule .* - [S=1]
 
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} =on [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.askapache\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule .* http://www.askapache.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]
 
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /(wp-admin/.*|wp-login\.php.*)\ HTTP/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule .* https://%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]

· sample htaccess  ·  RSS | 11:06 AM

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30x Faster WP-Super Cache Site Speed

NOT a typo.. 30x is measurable, well-documented, and easily tested. This is what open-source is about. I haven’t had time to post much the past year, I’m always working! So I wanted to make up for that by publishing an article on a topic that would blow your mind and be something that you could actually start using and really get some benefit out of it. This is one of those articles that the majority of web hosting companies would love to see in paperback, so they could burn it.

· Site  ·  RSS | 11:43 AM

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Advanced WordPress wp-config.php Tweaks

The bottom line for this article is that I want to make WordPress as fast, secure, and easy to install, run, and manage because I am using it more and more for client production sites, I will work for days in order to solve an issue so that I never have to spend time on that issue again. Time is money in this industry and that is ultimately (time) what there is to gain by tweaking WordPress.

Note: I spent no time on readability, this is primarily a read the code and figure it out article.. This is for advanced users looking for a reference or discussion and for those of you looking to advance. Feedback would be great if you make it that far..

· config  ·  RSS | 3:23 AM

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PortaPutty Auto-Reconnecting SSH Tunnels on an Encrypted TrueCrypt Portable USB Key w GPG

Ok I just came back up to write the intro.. I’m trying to keep it short to avoid getting bogged down by the coolness of each step. Here is what goes on. When I logon to my XP machine at work, I bring my usb key and plug it in first. On logging a window pops up first and it’s a password prompt to mount my encrypted drive leonardo. It also checks a keyfile that is located on my usb key, but all I do now is type in my password. That causes my encrypted folder to be accessible to me like a normal drive, and it autoruns a startup batch file.

The batch file causes Portable versions of Firefox (all my bookmarks, my settings) to load, and launches Portable Mozilla Thunderbird (IMAP makes this work well), which is my favorite program (great GPG features and open-source!). Also Some Adobe CS4 software is loaded from the hard drive, like DreamWeaver. In the background, a service we created executes a PortaPuttY plink command to create forwarded tunnels from various remote servers and accounts, all using key-based encryption. These tunnels are automatically reconnected if they are disconnected, meaning you can use a socks 5 if you want or even better!

Part 1 of 5

· HTTP  ·  RSS | 5:11 AM

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Optimize a Website for Speed, Security, and Easy Management

Learn how to setup, configure, secure, optimize, and create a low-maintenance website the AskApache way. I’m piecing together all the hacks, tricks, methods, and ideas discussed throughout this blog and all across Netdom and glueing them all together to show you how to have the most optimized, crazy fastest, and best website setup I can think of.

· web host  ·  RSS | 8:45 PM

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HTTP Status Codes and .htaccess ErrorDocuments

There are a total of 57 HTTP Status Codes recognized by the Apache Web Server. Wouldn’t you like to see what all those headers and their output, ErrorDocuments look like?

· Codes  ·  RSS | 3:56 PM

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Custom bash_profile for Advanced Shell Users

Looking for some advanced uses for the shell? Here is some of my best. The shell is where 70% of my work takes place, and I have at least one terminal open almost 100% of the time, for viewing tailing color-coded logs, and of course for the SSH Tunnels that I use to route various networking through, like my email. So I decided that to standardize and create a bash_profile containing the most time-saving and helpful functions that I could use on all the various hosting environments would really be some sweet sugar, so here is my constant Work-in-progress.

It works for all shells I encounter, including BackTrack, Debian, Knoppix, Arch Linux, etc. Also works for many hosting environments I use including DreamHost, HostGator, WiredTree, and pretty much any linux VPS.

I also rely on this heavily from within shell scripts I write to access all the functions and stuff in this .bash_profile, and to do that I just do like:

#!/bin/bash
 
source ~/.bash_profile &>/dev/nulll
 
pm "PM is a function to output nice messages with color"
yn "Are you enjoying the shell" && pm "Thats great!" || pm "Perhaps you're better suited for DOS"
yn "Show Calendar" && aa_calendar
yn "Show Fortune" && aa_fortune

· Advanced  ·  RSS | 3:32 PM

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Optimizing Servers and Processes for Speed with ionice, nice, ulimit

To prepare for several upcoming articles on AskApache that are focused on optimizing Servers and Sites from a server admin level, here is an article to introduce the main tools that we will be using. These tools are used to optimize CPU time for each process using nice and renice, and other tools like ionice are used to optimize the Disk IO, or Disk speed / Disk traffic for each process. Then you can make sure your mysqld and httpd processes are always fast and prioritized.

· CPU  ·  RSS | 1:41 AM

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Windows Optimization – Intense Part II

If you ever wanted to know the best way to defragment and speed up your Windows-Based PC, I mean you really wanted to know, here is the 2nd part to my article on Windows Speed Optimizing that details the process I have found works really well. Definately not a quick process, and certainly not the best ever, just my best ever and one that you only have to do once to get the benefits.
This article has a lot of incredibly useful (and FREE) tools I recommend, which you can grab and use without reading the article..

· MyDefrag  ·  RSS | 9:42 AM

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Protecting Files with Advanced Mod_Rewrite Anti-Hotlinking

If you have files on your site that you don’t want indexed by malicious search engines, grabbed and leeched by malicious spammers, or stolen and made available elsewhere, you can use mod_rewrite to drastically reduce or totally reduce that activity.

· Mod  ·  RSS | 1:09 AM

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Crazy Advanced Mod_Rewrite Tutorial

Note: Extremely ILL Content
Find the key to unlocking mod_rewrite and you WILL be sick.. sick with a diamond disease on your wrist!

· cheatsheet  ·  RSS | 12:55 PM

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An AskApache Plugin Upgrade to Rule them All

So my blog as been rather quiet for almost a year now, and very few updates if any have been released for my Password Protection PLugin, my Google 404 Plugin, and definately not for my AskApache CrazyCache plugin, which I will be releasing last… So for all of you who’ve helped me out by sending me suggestions and notifying me of errors and sticking with it… Just wanted to say sorry about that, and thanks for all the great ideas.. Well, I’ve been sticking with it as well believe it our not. I manage to get free days once in a while, and then its time to jam.

· Awesome Wordpress  ·  RSS | 1:59 PM

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The Right to Read

The proponents of this scheme have given it names such as “trusted computing” and “palladium”. We call it “treacherous computing”, because the effect is to make your computer obey companies instead of you. This was implemented in 2007 as part of Windows Vista; we expect Apple to do something similar. In this scheme, it is the manufacturer that keeps the secret code, but the FBI would have little trouble getting it.

· protection  ·  RSS | 4:48 PM

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PHP and AJAX shell console

Ever wanted to execute commands on your server through php? Now you can. I’m calling this file (see below) shell.php and it allows you to run commands on your web server with the same permissions that your php executable has.

· console  ·  RSS | 9:01 PM

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DNS Round Robin Configuration using Rsync over SSH

The goal is to add the HostGator server to be an exact mirror of the static.askapache.com domain, then to add that server as a 2nd A record to my DNS zone. That way half the visitors to the size will be taking up resources and bandwidth on the HostGator server instead of mine.

Round Robin A records in DNS are intended to evenly distribute queries between each host of the same name. Using some tricks straight out of a hackers toolbox we can verify if the distribution is taking place. (It is.)

· Robin  ·  RSS | 1:46 AM

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Mirroring an Entire Site using Rsync over SSH

Sometimes there is an urgent need for creating an exact duplicate or “mirror” of a web site on a separate server. This could be needed for creating Round Robin Setups, Load-Balancing, Failovers, or for just plain vanilla backups. In the past I have used a lot of different methods to copy data from one server to another, including creating an archive of the whole directory and then using scp to send the file over, creating an archive and then encrypting it and then sending that file over using ftp, curl, etc., and my persistence at learning new ways to do things has paid off because now I use rsync to keep an exact replica of the entire directory on an external server, without having to use all the CPU and resources of other mirroring methods.

· Site  ·  RSS | 7:40 AM

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Linux

Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system. Linux is one of the most prominent examples of free software and open source development; its underlying source code can be freely modified, used, and redistributed by anyone.

The Linux kernel was first released to the public on 17 September 1991, for the Intel x86 PC architecture. The kernel was augmented with system utilities and libraries from the GNU project to create a usable operating system, which later led to the alternate term GNU/Linux. Linux is now packaged for different uses in Linux distributions, which contain the sometimes modified kernel along with a variety of other software packages tailored to different requirements.

Predominantly known for its use in servers, Linux has gained the support of corporations such as IBM, Sun Microsystems, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Novell, and is used as an operating system for a wide variety of computer hardware, including desktop computers, supercomputers, and embedded devices such as mobile phones and routers.

Unix

Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX®) is a computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Douglas McIlroy. Today's Unix systems are split into various branches, developed over time by AT&T as well as various commercial vendors and non-profit organizations.

As of 2007, the owner of the trademark UNIX® is The Open Group, an industry standards consortium. Only systems fully compliant with and certified to the Single UNIX Specification qualify as "UNIX®" (others are called "Unix system-like" or "Unix-like").

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Unix's influence in academic circles led to large-scale adoption of Unix (particularly of the BSD variant, originating from the University of California, Berkeley) by commercial startups, the most notable of which is Sun Microsystems. Today, in addition to certified Unix systems, Unix-like operating systems such as Linux and BSD derivatives are commonly encountered.

Sometimes, "traditional Unix" may be used to describe a Unix or an operating system that has the characteristics of either Version 7 Unix or UNIX System V.

BSD

Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD, sometimes called Berkeley Unix) is the Unix derivative distributed by the University of California, Berkeley, starting in the 1970s. The term "BSD" is often non-specifically used to refer to any of the BSD descendants of today (e.g. FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD).

BSD is one of several branches of Unix operating systems. Another one is evolved from UNIX System V developed by AT&T's Unix System Development Labs. A third consists of the GNU/Linux operating systems which draw from both Unix System V and BSD, as well as Plan9, and non-UNIX operating systems.

BSD was widely identified with the versions of Unix available for workstation-class systems. This can be attributed to the ease with which it could be licensed and the familiarity it found among the founders of many technology companies during the 1980s. This familiarity often came from using similar systems—notably DEC's Ultrix and Sun's SunOS—during their education. While BSD itself was largely superseded by the System V Release 4 and OSF/1 systems in the 1990s (both of which incorporated BSD code), in recent years modified open source versions of the codebase (mostly derived from 4.4BSD-Lite) have seen increasing use and development.

OpenBSD

OpenBSD is a Unix-like computer operating system descended from Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), a Unix derivative developed at the University of California, Berkeley. It was forked from NetBSD by project leader Theo de Raadt in late 1995. The project is widely known for the developers' insistence on open source code and quality documentation; uncompromising position on software licensing; and focus on security and code correctness. The project is coordinated from de Raadt's home in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Its logo and mascot is Puffy, a pufferfish.

OpenBSD includes a number of security features absent or optional in other operating systems and has a tradition of developers auditing the source code for software bugs and security problems. The project maintains strict policies on licensing and prefers the open source BSD licence and its variants—in the past this has led to a comprehensive licence audit and moves to remove or replace code under licences found less acceptable.

As with most other BSD-based operating systems, the OpenBSD kernel and userland programs, such as the shell and common tools like cat and ps, are developed together in a single source repository. Third-party software is available as binary packages or may be built from source using the ports collection.

The OpenBSD project currently maintains ports for 17 different hardware platforms, including the DEC Alpha, Intel i386, Hewlett-Packard PA-RISC, AMD AMD64 and Motorola 68000 processors, Apple's PowerPC machines, Sun SPARC and SPARC64-based computers, the VAX and the Sharp Zaurus.

FreeBSD

FreeBSD is a Unix-like free operating system descended from AT&T UNIX via the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) branch through the 386BSD and 4.4BSD operating systems. It runs on Intel x86 family (IA-32) PC compatible systems (including the Microsoft Xbox[1]), and also DEC Alpha, Sun UltraSPARC, IA-64, AMD64, PowerPC and NEC PC-98 architectures. Support for the ARM and MIPS architectures are under development.

FreeBSD is developed as a complete operating system. The kernel, device drivers and all of the userland utilities, such as the shell, are held in the same source code revision tracking tree (CVS). This is in contrast to other free operating systems such as Linux where the kernel, userland utilities and applications are developed separately and packaged together by other groups as Linux distributions.

As an operating system, FreeBSD is generally regarded as reliable and robust, and of the operating systems that accurately report uptime remotely,[2] FreeBSD is the most common free operating system listed in Netcraft's list[3] of the 50 web servers with the longest uptime. A long uptime also indicates that no crashes have occurred and that no kernel updates have been deemed necessary, as installing a new kernel requires a reboot and resets the uptime counter of the system.

NetBSD

NetBSD is a freely redistributable, open source version of the Unix-derivative BSD computer operating system. It was the second open source BSD variant to be formally released, after 386BSD, and continues to be actively developed. Noted for its portability and quality of design and implementation, it is often used in embedded systems and as a starting point for the porting of other operating systems to new computer architectures.